Where it is Warm
by Captain Jasmine Vanity
Summary: The apocalypse started approximately three and a half months ago, and it's the best thing that ever happened to them.


(_one_)

Jade stops by the corpse, peers at the face, wiggles her fingers at the gaping holes in his chest and stomach.

Bec sniffs at intestines and Rose pretends not to notice.

"Jade," he says, and the air wavers in front of him, shimmers.

Her foot is on his head, and now she's pressing those heels into him, there's a wet sound and a crack and a squelch and she's standing in brains and the crushed skull of her next door neighbour.

"It's not real," Dave says.

"It's not real."

(_two_)

His dad hasn't been home in weeks.

Or has it been months?

All he knows is the world's gone mad, they're hunting humans and hunting others and they're all drowning in heat and Jade crushes skulls and it's summer like it's never been before.

"Let's go to California," Dave says, and Jade throws a can of soup at him.

"It's warm there."

(_three_)

They're all dead, just as dead as Washington and New York and Australia and the rest of the screwed up world, and they surf and steal food and smoke and drink and have the teenage summer everyone dreams of.

He wakes up one day in the middle of a tangle of limbs, all dusky brown and honeyed pale and white, and wonders when everything got so perfect.

It takes the end of the world to satisfy.

(_four_)

Jade gets sick, and they feed her to Bec.

She's back the next day, and everything is an LSD dream.

(_five_)

Everything is false.

"Nothing is real," he says, and he means it.

"It's all a lie."

"It's not real."

(_six_)

They find one after three months, a shambling corpse, rotting but dry, tongue falling out of it's head.

Their first live one.

She used to be pretty, he thinks, and Dave cracks it's femur with a baseball bat.

"Kill it," Jade commands.

"Show it how to hurt."

Rose is the one who grabs a fistful of hair and peels the last bit of skin clinging to it's face off

And then he's there with a brick and she has no ribs now, how did that happen?

Dave steps on her spine and grinds her face into the curb, face tightening at the snap of her jaw breaking and the sight of the brow-black-red blood that spills.

It smells, and he waits for night.

(_seven_)

She slides onto him with a moan, and her twin is kissing her hard from behind John.

He tastes his sister and thinks of honey.

Dave spills over his stomach and Rose can't have children, so he lets go inside her and watches the two girls finish each other with their lips.

It's crazy days and lazy heat, and everything's insane and they're all free.

(_eight_)

None of them can skate, and he teaches them on ice with bodies trapped beneath.

Children who'd devoured their parents-

Parents clutching at raw pieces of meat, crying over horrific things that used to be sons and daughters and babies and lovers-

Jade laughs, and Rose kisses her, and he loves the world.

They kill at night, and rekill in the day, and spare no one.

Dad and Bro and Mom and Grandpa said no, but they didn't say it for long.

The world is dead, and moaning is the song.

(_nine_)

He sings to a CD, and the radios have all stopped their autoplayed tracks.

New music is a dream.

"It's not real," Dave says again, and he puts his cigarette out on his arm.

Jade and Rose are on the couch and their clothes are on the floor.

Dave strums the guitar and he sings again.

"Let's go see a movie," he says.

"God's moving in your bloodstream, where the cross beats aren't so slow…"

He nods to himself, and Dave sings over Jade's moans.

(_ten_)

He kills a woman with a two-by-four and a handful of nails, and Dave calls him a sick fucker.

The crimson blood doesn't disguise her healthy skin, and Dave takes him against the side of the building behind him.

Jade leans against Bec on the curb and wonders what Europe is like.

Rose taps ash off the end of her cigarette and announces that she has to piss.

(_eleven_)

They meet an ex-con in his mid thirties, and his white wifebeater makes him laugh.

"I still hate that movie," Dave says.

They live with him for a week before he ties the man to a chair and kills him.

He takes his time, and they have a reward feast of Doritos and apple juice.

"Feels like home," Dave says.

He washes blood off himself in the ocean, and gets a sunburn in his dreams.

Rose wakes him up by stepping on his stomach and announcing that they're leaving.

"I want to go to Mexico," Jade says.

(_twelve_)

"Neither of them know how fucked up you are," Rose is saying, and he sees red. "But I do. And I won't let you destroy them the way you've done to everything else."

He tells them she slipped and fell and stabbed herself in the throat.

Jade saves her life anyways, but Rose can't talk anymore.

He likes it better without her ceaseless babbling anyways.

(_thirteen_)

Mexico reeks of dead and rotting and feces and more rotting, and Bec tears off a little boy's leg to eat.

Jade laughs and pets him, calls him a good dog and goes back to riding Dave.

Rose cups her throat and tries to whisper.

(f_ourteen_)

He follows behind Jade as she steps in skulls and dances through fields, and no matter what, he can't just shut his eyes and pretend it's okay for a while.

He misses the way things used to be when there was just killing and friends.

(_fifteen_)

Bec tells them to stop screaming.

He turns off the chainsaw and steps back to look at his work.

The wall is crimson, and Dave says it's not real.

Nothing is, anymore.

(_sixteen_)

They're tangled together again, all tanned skin and bloody lips

And it's still not real.

They go hunting that day, and everything is okay.

Jade's merciless and beautiful-

Dave swings his bat and behind the shades there's glee-

Rose lets them get close and crushes skulls with her bare hands and he falls in love with them all over again and when they pick a house for the night it's all sex and heat and perfection.

They drink and smoke and laugh and hunt and it's the teenage summer people only dream of.

(_seventeen_)

"I hit him with the barrel of my shotgun," Jade is saying, and he's sprawled across Dave as he rides him lazily.

"His head cracked like one of his goddamned pumpkins."

He thinks this is perfection, and when Rose kisses him, all venom and teeth and whiteblack beauty, when Jade joins in the slow lovemaking with a hand and a mouth, when Dave kisses him and whispers love

He comes with a whisper and it's more like a prayer.

(_eighteen_)

They break into a beach house and discover blood on the walls.

:o) Do:

"This kid was fucked up," Dave says, and Jade laughs like it's a joke.

They eat a frozen meal and Dave pisses in the sink.

He discovers heroin and it i y

.

(_nineteen_)

His skin is itching and he can feel the insects, see his skin crawling- he's burning and they're all zombies, he's in hell and heaven is in a needle-

He overdoses on perfection, and wakes up to a room full of white widow and Dave.

(_twenty_)

"The world is ending," Rose says, and his heroin has long since run out.

It wasn't a pretty detox, but when he comes back, the world is just as ugly.

He drowns in night and silence and screaming and sunshine.

"It's not real," Dave says again, and he says it with the blonde.

"It's not real."

(_twenty one_)

They lounge around on leather sofas, dead cows, and they're less dead than the rest of the world.

His brain is filled with marbles and dreams spill out of his mouth.

Rose strokes Dave as he sits in her lap, and Jade teaches Bec to fetch a human heart.

"Not human," he says, and he doesn't know if he's talking about them or the shambling rot they keep killing.

He has to keep remembering that It's Not Real.


End file.
